Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from [Mike Pena - Simmons].
[Mike Pena - Simmons]
Joe, question for you. In these two recent Gothic shale completions, what specifically allowed you to better mitigate the salt issues you had previously while still achieving large fracs?
Joe Jaggers
The early efforts with what I've called the boutique fracs, the small fracs using combinations of sand sizes to try to establish barriers to isolate from the salt, weren't entirely effective. There were some limited success with avoiding salt, but generally we continued to produce salt saturated brine on flow back. But what we decided to do simply in these last two well completions was ignore that possibility of contacting salt and work on optimum stimulation of the reservoir and learn to live with salt.
So most of that learning to live with salt has been the installation of these capillaries strings, just a small stainless steel continuous tubing that's banded to the 2-3/8 where we inject fresh water down hole and that, as you can see from the plot there, has produced our most stable results to date. We've had no issues with salt deposition at all in tubing wellhead, chokes, production, equipment, that sort of thing.
[Mike Pena - Simmons]
Then the program there going forward is to continue?
Joe Jaggers
It's currently being developed, but it will depend a lot on these next few months of production, but we do plan to resume activity in 2010. It's just a matter of how many wells and what the timing is. I think I've mentioned this previously, but this area has got a pretty well developed system of irrigation ditches. And those open late in the spring and we want to be in a position to use that water when it's available, particularly when we're doing these high, high volume frac jobs it allow us to avoid a lot of trucking expense that you generally have.
[Mike Pena - Simmons]
Then you guys mentioned earlier your view of kind of Rockies basis going forward. If you look at the forward curve, how does that impact your hedging strategy going forward? Does that keep you from going as far out in hedging or is it that's still the plan to protect cash flow?
Bob Howard
We would expect we'll certainly pay attention to the basis as we enter into our hedges, but we still feel it's appropriate to protect our cash flow by hedging at prices that work well at that net Rockies prices. And so when we set our hedging targets, we do set those targets at a CIG equivalent price which is where we sell our gas and try to match it up to the economics that we see from development of properties.
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